Nets parting with Cavaliers' Kenny Atkinson fueled his COTY bid
The Brooklyn Nets made an important decision more than five years ago when they had a mutual parting with then-head coach Kenny Atkinson as the Nets had a 28-34 record. Since then, there has been to make over the paths that Brooklyn and Atkinson took since the parting, but Atkinson deems the splitting of ways to be beneficial to his coaching career.
"That one hurt," Atkinson said of the mutual parting, according to Shaun Powell of NBA.com. "Hurt me, hurt my family; they were settled in Brooklyn. You've got to sit down with your kids, tell them you've been fired. And it's also not just personal, but a competitive and pride thing. I'm a local. I do think in another city the blow would've been less, but coming to New York, it was more. I wanted to stay long there."
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After the Nets parted ways with Atkinson, the team finished the 2019-20 season with a 7-3 record under interim head coach Jacque Vaughn, allowing them to make the NBA playoffs where they proceeded to be swept by the Toronto Raptors in the first round. After leaving Brooklyn, Atkinson went on to be an assistant for the Los Angeles Clippers and the Golden State Warriors before being hired as the head coach of the Cleveland Cavaliers for the 2024-25 campaign.
While Atkinson had a tough act to follow given that Cleveland fired JB Bickerstaff after the team finished with a 48-34 record before losing to the Boston Celtics in the Eastern Conference Semifinals in the 2023-24 season, the former Nets coach managed to turn things around for the Cavaliers. Under Atkinson's watch, the Cavaliers went on to finish this season with a 64-18 record that earned him the Coach of the Year award.
"I'm definitely different," Atkinson continued. "I've changed. I wouldn't have been ready for this job before. I needed to get fired, needed those experiences, needed to go through all that. Now I feel super confident in my own skin, whereas before, maybe not that much." It's tough to say that a firing benefits someone, but it seems like Atkinson did what he could to learn from the situation and move on.
This article originally appeared on Nets Wire: Nets parting with Cavaliers' Kenny Atkinson fueled his COTY bid
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